How I Built a Brick Barbecue Grill

When I bought a new house I found myself with one large pile of red bricks and another pile of cinder blocks. The old 18" Weber grill had recently lost its legs and I needed to upgrade so I decided to build a brick barbecue myself. I started by buying the grills (at Home Depot) then designing the hearth around the grills. The top grill (cooking surface) is 14" x 21" and the lower grill, which is raised above the hearth floor by 2.5" and is about 4" below the top grill, is a smaller 11" x 18". When the barbecue is in use the top grill is lifted up, the charcoal is placed on the lower grill and set alight, then the top grill is put back in its place. It is usually recommended to line the hearth with special 'fire bricks', but since the lower grill keeps the burning charcoal out of contact with the bricks, and because I didn't want to spend the money, I just used the regular bricks for everything and haven't noticed any problems yet.

The general approach I took was to build up the barbecue base from the floor against a cinder block wall at the back, construct the hearth on the base, then build a brick wall out from the back wall to the right of the base and connect the wall to the hearth with a counter top at the level of the top grill. I decided to make this level 36" above the floor, mainly because that is the level of the cooking surfaces on my stove top. Of course you can make your own barbecue any level you wish, depending on your own height.

Since I didn't have an existing back wall I had to build it first. Using large cinder blocks (7.5" x 15.5" x 7.5") I build up a wall. Then I outlined the base with bricks, with the core of the base containing smaller cinder blocks (5.25" high) as shown here:

You could just make the base out of solid bricks, but I had a lot of the cinder blocks and only just enough bricks; besides it saves a lot of time using a few big blocks instead of having to cement up a lot of small bricks.

When the base had been built up to a height of 27" (this took 3 layers of the cinder block core and 9 layers of bricks around it) it was time to build the hearth on top of the base:

Within the outside brick frame I lined the hearth inside with bricks placed on their side. Consider each brick is 8.25" long, 3.75" wide, and 2.5" high, so the thickness of the hearth wall is one brick-width and one brick-height. The hearth is three brick layers high; the lower grill is one brick-height above the hearth floor, and the upper grill is almost 2 brick-heights above the lower grill. Small pieces of brick are cemented at the back and front walls inside the hearth so that the grills just lay on top of the brick, free to slide left-to-right or to be removed completely.

At the floor level of the hearth there should be at least one hole, which is simply a gap in the first layer of bricks, which not only lets air in to the charcoal from below, but is also useful for cleaning out the ashes, and is necessary if it rains on your barbecue as it provides drainage. Don't forget to leave a gap in both outer and inner brick layers. I made my side hole one brick-width long so that I can just plug it up by stuffing a brick into it. I also made two smaller holes in the front although they turned out to be unnecessary as there is plenty of air supply to the coals. Don't put a hole on the right side because then hot ashes and rain water will get into your storage area.

Finally the brick wall to the right is built. I made mine only 17" away from the base because of the cinder-block back wall ending and because of the size of the stainless steel plate that I used for my counter top to connect the wall with the grill box. You can make your wall further apart if desired, which will result in a larger storage area under the counter top. Here is the final product:

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